Drunk furniture: Not here Steve

They had been sitting around the corner from my house for days, if not weeks. Two pieces of tatty old furniture, one upturned and placed atop the other, locked together in an almost erotic embrace that, if you let your imagination run wild, verged on the pornographic. Every time I passed them, they seemed to look less like fly-tipped rejects from DFS and more like drunken lovers, unaware of passers-by and intently focused on the pleasure of the other. Which might say more about my state of mind than the arrangement of the furniture, but there you go. I surreptitiously took a picture of them and walked home.

For some reason, I had imposed human emotions upon things that weren't even in the ballpark of being human, but I guess that's not so unusual. It's a simple delight; we instinctively draw faces on stuff when we're bored, and what are Donald Duck and Thomas the Tank Engine if not human characters stuck inside non-human containers? Joel Veitch, the internet viral pioneer, once said that "the internet is made of cats", and while that's kind of true (it's hard to get through a week on social media without encountering pictures of them emerging from buckets or dangling from branches), the truth is that the internet, or at least part of it, runs on a kind of absurd anthropomorphism. A picture of an expectant-looking cat is funny, but a picture of an expectant-looking cat saying "I can has cheezburger?" is far funnier.

Hundreds if not thousands of websites are living proof of this. So-called image macros – pictures captioned with capital letters that, for some reason, all use the Impact font – have been common internet currency for nearly a decade, but have lost little of their appeal in that time. As I was to discover when I captioned my drunken, lovestruck chairs with "NOT HERE STEVE", uploaded them to a Twitter account called @drunkfurniture, and watched as people began to retweet it.

"Is this funny?" I asked my friend, the writer Sarah Bee. "Yes," she said. "But let's make them a bit more explicitly drunk and slurring." Sarah (currently on the wagon) has a talent for coining phrases such as "I DON'T FEEL VERY WELRGH" and "BLOODY HELL SAKES" that perfectly capture a state of drunken confusion. So "OOPS" becomes a more inebriated "OOP". "WAAGHBLUUP" is perfect when someone (in this case a sofa) falls into a river. "BLOOPH" represents a particularly fruity belch. This is so obviously how drunken pieces of furniture would speak to us, and to each other. So, armed with Sarah's unconventional lexicon, I started to give voices to these disorientated chairs and tables, unceremoniously dumped by people too lazy to take them to the tip.

I ventured out for a walk and found a pair of orange chairs in an alleyway. Normally, I wouldn't have given them a second glance, but now they suggested a very particular scene: an inebriated bloke pursuing a partner who had finally snapped after months of tolerating his drunken behaviour. "LISA WHY WONTYU LOOKATME" he was quite clearly saying as she wriggled out of his way. Yes, the humour might have been a bit dark, but hey, we're only talking chairs here. I captioned the picture using Impact, as font etiquette requires, and uploaded it. More retweets brought people flocking; they looked at these regrettable adventures of everyday objects and in them saw reflected their own errant, alcohol-fuelled behaviour.

The @drunkfurniture Twitter account now has getting on for 7,000 followers, which might be good or might be rubbish (numbers are so hard to interpret on the internet) but it's certainly a testament to the endless ability of anthropomorphism to make people happy. I would stress, of course, that fly-tipping is not to be encouraged. There are designated places to put unwanted furniture, and these do not include pavements, alleyways, parks and woodland. Having said that, if you've spotted some, and you've taken a picture in order to report it to your local authority, do copy us in: pictures@drunkfurniture.com. The stories of these unfortunate items surely need to be told.